10 Books That Changed How I Think

Started at 15. Not inspiration — a systems framework. The chapter on espionage alone is worth the read. The key insight: victory is determined before the battle is fought. I try to win before I start. Every system I build, every trade I take, every team I structure — the preparation phase is where it's won or lost. The actual execution is just confirmation.

Started at 17. Coup d'œil — the ability to see the whole situation instantly — is the skill I've spent 20 years developing. Clausewitz's concept of friction is underrated: the gap between theory and reality in any complex operation. Software systems have friction. Markets have friction. Teams have friction. The plan that accounts for friction is the plan that survives contact with reality.

The first trading book that didn't feel like a formula. Primary sources — interviews with the best traders in the world. The pattern is unmistakable: every great trader has a framework, and they never break it. Not occasionally. Never. That insight became InDecision. The framework isn't the edge — the discipline to execute it consistently is.

The psychology layer underneath InDecision. The market doesn't care about your framework. Your edge only materializes if you execute without interference from your own psychology — fear, hope, and ego are the three forces that destroy consistently profitable traders. InDecision is a System 2 tool. This book explains why System 2 tools are necessary in the first place.

The scientific foundation for understanding why every bias the market exploits is a feature of human cognition, not a bug. System 1 — fast, intuitive, pattern-matching — is the enemy in trading. It pattern-matches on noise. InDecision is a System 2 forcing function: it requires structured analysis before any decision. This book is why I built the framework the way I built it.

The closest thing to how I actually operate as an engineering manager. Systems thinking applied to people and teams. Larson's framing of organizational debt is underrated — the idea that structural decisions in teams accrue interest just like technical decisions. The insight about sizing teams correctly before scaling them applies directly to how I think about the 12-engineer team at SAS.

The framework that changed how I think about building systems. Don't just be robust to volatility — gain from it. Antifragility is not resilience. Resilience returns to its original state after a shock. Antifragility improves. PolyEdge profits from market uncertainty. invictus-sentinel surfaces failures as learning opportunities. That's not accidental — it's a design principle derived directly from Taleb.

Theory of Constraints in fictional form. Every system has one bottleneck that limits throughput. Optimizing anything other than the bottleneck does not improve overall throughput — it just creates inventory pile-up. The most important engineering insight I've encountered. I apply this constantly: to pipelines, to team workflows, to trading systems. Find the constraint. Everything else is secondary.

Alpha Phi Alpha already gave me servant leadership — the disposition to lead for others. Extreme Ownership gave me the tactical layer. No bad teams, only bad leaders. I've seen this be true consistently across five companies and 16 years of engineering. The discipline of taking full ownership of outcomes — including bad ones — is the behavioral pattern that separates leaders from managers.

The book that wired together AI, mathematics, music, and self-reference in my mind at 19. Strange loops are everywhere in systems. A system that can represent itself can generate paradoxes — and possibilities — that a system without self-reference cannot. This is the reason I think about AI recursion and self-improvement as carefully as I do. When GPT-5 Codex debugs its own training pipeline, that is not an engineering curiosity. It is a Gödelian moment.